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Home Libraries Provide Huge Educational Advantage

Will your child finish college? The answer may be as close as your bookshelves, or lack thereof.

Get thee a home library. Research shows that your child's academic success may depend on it. (Doug Miller / flickr.com)
April 8, 2010 • By • 32 Comments

In an era of electronic entertainment, the term “home library” increasingly has the word “video” in the middle. But before parents start giving away books to clear shelf space for DVDs, they’ll want to consider the results of a comprehensive new study.

After examining statistics from 27 nations, a group of researchers found the presence of book-lined shelves in the home — and the intellectual environment those volumes reflect — gives children an enormous advantage in school.

“Home library size has a very substantial effect on educational attainment, even adjusting for parents’ education, father’s occupational status and other family background characteristics,” reports the study, recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. “Growing up in a home with 500 books would propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average, than would growing up in a similar home with few or no books.

“This is a large effect, both absolutely and in comparison with other influences on education,” adds the research team, led by University of Nevada sociologist M.D.R. Evans. “A child from a family rich in books is 19 percentage points more likely to complete university than a comparable child growing up without a home library.”

This effect holds true regardless of a nation’s wealth, culture or political system, but its intensity varies from country to country. In China, a child whose parents own 500 books will average 6.6 more years of education than a comparable child from a bookless home. In the U.S., the figure is 2.4 years — which is still highly significant when you consider it’s the difference between two years of college and a full four-year degree.

The researchers used data from the World Inequality Study, which pooled information from a series of representative national samples. In most nations, survey participants (a total of more than 73,000 people) were asked to estimate the number of books in their parents’ home when they were 14 years old. The scholars compared that figure with other factors influencing educational achievement, including the education levels of one’s parents.

“Regardless of how many books the family already has, each addition to a home library helps the children get a little farther in school,” they report. “But the gains are not equally great across the entire range. Having books in the home has a greater impact on children from the least-educated families. It is at the bottom, where books are rare, that each additional book matters most.”

Evans and her colleagues contend the number of books at home is an excellent reflection of a family’s “scholarly culture,” which they describe as a “way of life in homes where books are numerous, esteemed, read and enjoyed.” An early immersion in such a culture “provides skills and competencies that are useful in school,” and/or engenders “a preference for and enjoyment of books and reading that makes schooling congenial, or enjoyable,” they conclude.

So mom and dad don’t have to be scholars themselves; they just have to read and respect books, and pass that love of reading down to their children. Anna Quindlen was clearly onto something when she wrote: “I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.”

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About Tom Jacobs

Staff writer Tom Jacobs is a veteran journalist with more than 20 years experience at daily newspapers. He has served as a staff writer for The Los Angeles Daily News and the Santa Barbara News-Press. His work has also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Ventura County Star.

  • Sherrie Young

    Dear Mr. Jacobs,

    We at the National Book Foundation read your article, “Home Libraries Provide Huge Educational Advantage,” and would like to congratulate you on a terrific piece. Our mission is to promote reading to all audiences in America, so we’re grateful to come across articles like yours. We also thought you might be interested to know about our educational program, BookUpNYC, through which we strive to get middle-schoolers excited about books and reading. In addition to having writer-instructors conduct after-school sessions in New York City-area schools, we also take the kids on field trips to local literary sites and bookstores where they can purchase $25 worth of books to help build their own personal libraries at home. Though we’re already passionate about the work we do in programs such as BookUpNYC, your article provided further encouragement that what we’re doing is not only a worthy but also a productive pursuit.

    If you’d like further information about BookUpNYC, please visit http://www.nationalbook.org/bookupnyc.html.

  • Greg W.

    Dear Mr. Jacobs,
    Lately I have been reading more and more articles about the various electronic options for book readers (The Kindle, the Nook, etc.), replete with doomsday predictions for the publishing industry. In that context, I thank you for your well-supported argument which calls out an important question: Would a paperless (if still extensive) family library provide the same academic advantage as you have described here? My personal suspicion would have to be that it would not, but I hope to see this point discussed in the future.
    Sincerely,
    Greg W. (Toronto, Canada)

  • Ed

    Greg,

    I think the prominence of the display is a key factor here. I don’t know how prominently you could display a Kindle, but having one for every family member might lend some of the symbolic might of reading that a house full of books has.

    Then again, I don’t know how much iconic value a 500-book Kindle would have as compared to a 5-book Kindle. As a physical symbol, they’re indistinguishable.

  • Sad bibliophile

    Too bad that the federal government, in its infinite wisdom, has essentially ordered the destruction of old children’s books, and has put a legal cloud over passing on large home libraries. Worse yet, they still won’t admit there’s a problem.

    (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go to overlawyered.com and the “CPSIA” tag. Or google “CPSIA” “lead” and “children’s books.” Truly horrifying.)

  • Jennifer Lutzky

    Help a child who has no home library start one! Go to http://www.firstbook.org and make a small donation to provide a child with their very first book to own. Every home library has to start somewhere.

  • Kate Kolbe

    A back-lit LED reading device does not beckon one the way a cozy corner bookshelf illuminated by warm lamplight does. I think the physical books and inviting spaces have a lot to do with how many books children may be interested to read. A 500 book Kindle does not call to the mind and soul in quite the same way.

    Thank you for your lovely article!

  • MartyD

    This reminds me of something my youngest said when he was six. We were planning a move out of the DC area and when asked for his input he said “I just want to be someplace clean and quiet and ready.” He pronounced that “reedy” as in a place to read. He wanted a place to hole up with one of his many books and didn’t really care in which state it was located.

  • Dave9

    I don’t wonder if there isn’t a time bias here. If you’re correlating academic achievement and the number of books in a family library, this implies that the children this study has tracked are at least a certain age.
    If that age is greater than 10-15, then their formative years would have been before the rise in popularity of the internet and digital media such as the Kindle or iPad. One would have to wait until those who are currently young children grow up to see if having a computer with access to the internet or a Kindle would have the same benefits as a home library.

  • Nemo

    I really enjoyed this piece. I grew up (I’m now 55) in a small midwest farm town. At that time neither my mother or step-father were big readers – neither had gone past high school – but my mother did have one book shelf that held a surprising range of books. They were mostly the popular fiction of the mid 20th century – Frank Yerby, Jack London, that sort of thing, but had a few surprises, too, like Shakespeare, Dickens and even Balzac.
    I went on to get a BA in Literature and have been an avid – and wide ranging – reader all my life. My current library contains something over 500 volumes, most of them hardback. I completely credit my love of literature, history, science fiction, and all the rest to the ready availability of those first musty volumes.

  • Anonymous

    Iam 72 years old…and remember (like yesterday) my dad reading books. He was an orphan and did not go pass the 8th grade in public schools.Many years later I discovered he had a fettish reading about the american mafia…as I came into possesion of all the books he had saved…and found out my grandfather had been executed by the mob (in upper state NY) by mistake at night in the dark. (they were after my Dads brother who was involved in illegal gambling (scimming from the mob).These were not the only books, as he loved to read fiction novels about people who had been grown up in families different from his. It did,however give me a respect for books shelved in a home growing up.
    I now have two children with ADVANCED DEGREES who grew up with one room filled with books. A home library. When they had a subject at school we would discuss the books on the shelves and supplement them with the LIBRARY.I have made sure my kids grew up with books in our home in view each day. It worked. In conclusion I must say: THERE ARE FEWER PLEASURES IN THIS WORLD THAN READING A BOOK TO THE LAST WORD AND HOLDING IT IN YOUR HANDS………………….

  • bbf

    In 1951, pregnant with my first child, a friend advised,”Start reading to her as soon as she is born.” I did. At 6 mos., she knew when I skipped or mispronounced a word and would look up at me questionably and point her finger at the book. I would then re-read the sentence.

    Today she had advanced degrees and is nationally known in her specialized field. Key: Start early to develop knowledge and love for books/education. It’s worked for all 3 of my children.

  • Tom E.

    Books: the original laptop!

  • mwe

    I’m a bit wary of the conclusions drawn in this article — perhaps the author has confused cause and effect. Full bookshelves don’t create scholarly children; parents do. The quantity of reading material in the home is almost certainly less a factor in a child’s educational success than his or her parents’ genetic makeup, academic encouragement, and intellectual curiosity. I’d argue that the books are the evidence of the forces at work, and not the force itself.

  • Craig Nansen

    Although I don’t dispute the data, the conclusion is one that I will use in a graduate statistics class as an example of drawing a poor conclusion from data.

    The article implies that if a parent were to go out and purchase 500+ books to stock a home library, they would be improving their childrens’ chances of taking more years of schooling. Just the act of having established a home library does not mean that reading and education are highly valued in the home.

    The parents who had home libraries are highly likely to be parents who value reading and education. You would probably find similar results even if these parent had just a few books around the home.

  • Jim Meredith

    In almost every law firm office we’ve designed in the past decade, the law library has been the among of the first components to disappear as these firms sought ways to reduce their spatial footprint in areas of high cost real estate. Online legal information services allow an attorney to access almost any reference information at the desk that used to be in books and journals.

    In the continuing discussion about the relevance of libraries in law firms, schools and communities, and the parallel discussion about any ongoing relevance of print, this is an interesting piece of input into the evaluation of the costs, and benefits of the physical.

    Does the presence of a library act as a symbol of certain values in family or community? What might be the influence of the home with a half-dozen iPads sitting around instead of books? And does the reduction of the scale of technology down to the size of a magazine (enabling it to become a booklike-portable part of the flow of life rather than a desk-bound device) give it a similar resonance about intellectual openness and curiosity that the library did?

  • Renee Mosiman

    It is important to start collecting books early and reading to your child. Include weekly library visits. Read all types of books including phonics books, fairy tales, chapter books, and nonfiction books in science and history. Read daily at least 30 minutes a day.

    Renee, author of
    http://www.thesmarterpreschooler.com
    Gold Winner Mom’s Choice Award.

  • Nicole

    Certainly no one doubts the importance that a culture of reading has in a child’s formation, or that such a culture is more important than the mere presence or ownership of books. But I would not be so quick to dismiss the home library for its own sake. I would not be able to conclude more without first reading the study, but parents, educators, and librarians know that access to a wide variety of reading material is a significant factor in education. The presence of books increases the opportunities for exploration with or without a parent/guide, encourages intellectual curiosity, and allows a child to satisfy such curiosity more independently. Surely that is part of why each additional book constitutes an educational gain, and why such gains are more significant in less-educated households, where, for a number of reasons, a culture of reading may be (though not necessarily is) less likely to exist.

  • Bonnie Buckingham

    Reminds me of CS Lewis’s home.
    Encouraging article.
    OR the preface to The Little Bookroom by Eleonar Farjeon!

  • Shawna

    I would argue that a home library is an inside into the culture of a family. At the very least, the child has access to all kinds of ideas. I remember reading a biographical account of the author Gary Paulsen once; he grew up in a family of fighting drunks and books were his way onwards and forwards. In his case, a caring librarian made all the difference. No matter the size of a home (or public) library, having access to books is very important.

  • Nancy

    I am a librarian, MSLS; my husband a businessman (MBA). Our two children were 2 years apart. Both were read to identically; equally had access to thousands of books. One completed graduate school. The other did not finish junior college. Why?

  • Bonnie Barnes

    One of the biggest influences in my intellectual life, growing up, was access to the bookshelves in my house. My parents were college teachers, and as I lounged in my parents’ den, I would see the books, pick them up, and read them. My mother’s collection of novels such as Native Son and The Sound and the Fury, plays by Henrik Ibsen, and theological books by C. S. Lewis beckoned me to pick them up, open them, and explore them. When I needed something to read, all I had to do was browse my parents’ shelves.

    I also was lucky enough to live across the street from my parents’ college and have access to the children’s reading room, set up for teachers in training, and filled with books for all ages. My friend Debra and I spent one summer, when we were 9 or 10, riding our bikes to that library every day and reading right there in that room—no need to check anything out! We had a good public library in town and we used it too, but the college library was right there and the reading room was a little hideaway we had all to ourselves.

    When I try to imagine a world without physical books, where everything is digital and electronic, I always wonder how our kids would be exposed to the stories? Would they choose to pick up an e-reader and scroll up and down on a tiny screen, or will they just default to the video game and television set sitting right in front of them? How would they be aware that the books exist? That’s one of many reasons I think the physical book will never go away, although e-books are fine for some purposes.

    Wal-Mart is said to have a display system called “Actionality” where likely impulse purchases are put right out in front of the consumers in order to attract their attention and sell more items, whether they were intending to get those things or not. Books need to be out in front of our children, where they can see them, pick them up, and flip through them. Else they will probably never know that a lot of these books ever existed.

  • Leonard J. Vidal

    Thank goodness my wife’s and my parents were readers, and so were we. We always had books all over our house, including a permanent collection of a few hundred books I’d been carting around for 20 – 30 years. For parents of young children who want to accumulate a massive book collection, consider doing what I did when I was 22: I started a used book store. This store became a magnet for every person in the community who was cleaning out their attic, garage, basement, closets, or wherever else old books would reside. I kept the gems with me my whole life and my children Ethan and Victoria grew up surrounded by a library that might have rivaled Thomas Jefferson’s. It paid off, since they were both National Merit Scholars, one going to Amherst and one to Wesleyan.

  • RioRico

    My childhood home, staffed by junior-college graduate parents, contained some books, but not a lot. But grandma read me stories, and I frequented town and school libraries, and books absorbed me. My house is now filled with printed material. My daughter’s house isn’t, although she’s several degrees beyhond me. Her kids read

  • RioRico

    Oops, that was submitted too soon. I was saying:

    My daughter’s house isn’t, although she’s several degrees beyond me. Her kids read early but in a skimpy environment. I’ll just have to load them down with books, real books, the kind we can fondle and smell and tAste. To travel with a library, an e-book reader is just right. But when laying about, there’s nothing like a real book.

  • Avid Reader

    In Toronto, Canada there is a storefront gem, The Children’s Book Bank where a book-a-day is given to any child under 12 to help build their own “home library”.
    http://www.childrensbookbank.com/
    and also
    http://www.blogto.com/books_lit/2008/11/torontos_first_childrens_book_bank_turns_half/

    “I like to own my own books because I can read them many times.”
    Kulisara
    Age 7
    (from the website)

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  • tess

    Thank you for this article. My mother never received her high school diploma. The child of an immigrant mechanic with a 4th grade education, she was kicked out of 9th grade for mouthing a teacher and promptly sent out to help support her family. HOWEVER, my mother truly valued education, and she made every effort to learn as much as she could alongside my older siblings as they attended high school. By the time I was born, Mom and Dad had collected an impressive selection of books: the classics, an encyclopedia set with yearly updates, many Time/Life science and history books, and as many nonfiction/fiction bestsellers as they could find. We did not own library cards because we were too far out of town, so my mom created a library of 1000's of childrens books for us. When one is surrounded by so many books, right there at your fingertips, you are given independence and power to explore, to find answers, to imagine beyond your world. I have always been thankful for that gift! My love affair with books continues, and a portion of the bookshelves that graced my childhood home now festoon my daughter's bedroom and our family room, a gift to my children and the many friends they bring to play and read at our home.

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  • JulieCC

    This is wonderful news for a home with 1500+ books! Our son is homeschooled and when he's not doing "school work" he has a book from our shelves, or the library (we go 3 x's/week) in his hand. He even tries to read in the shower! Thanks for a great article!